Spreading the News is a short one-act comic play by Lady Gregory, which she wrote for the opening night of the Abbey Theatre

Abbey Theatre

The Abbey Theatre , also known as the National Theatre of Ireland , is a theatre located in Dublin, Ireland. The Abbey first opened its doors to the public on 27 December 1904. Despite losing its original building to a fire in 1951, it has remained active to the present day...

 in Dublin, 27 Dec. 1904. It was on a double bill with William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...

's Cathleen Ni Houlihan. Audiences may have dozed through Yeats's play , but Spreading the News was very successful and it is still acted at the Abbey Theatre as late as 1961. Lady Gregory remarked after seeing an early performance of the play that "the audience would laugh so much at 'Spreading the News' that they lost about half the dialogue. I mustn't be so amusing again!"

Plot summary

In a small village in rural Ireland, a new (English) magistrate inspects stalls at the local fair, expecting the worst. Because of Mrs. Tarpey's hearing impairment

Hearing impairment

-Definition:Deafness is the inability for the ear to interpret certain or all frequencies of sound.-Environmental Situations:Deafness can be caused by environmental situations such as noise, trauma, or other ear defections...

 and the villagers' love of gossip, a misunderstanding grows and grows, leading to a false arrest

False arrest

False arrest is a common law tort, where a plaintiff alleges they were held in custody without probable cause, or without an order issued by a court of competent jurisdiction...

 for a murder that never happened. The play ends abruptly, with little resolution; we are left wondering what happened. Most of the humour is situational, rather than playing with language. Because we know what really happened at the beginning, most of the play uses dramatic irony

Irony

Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions...

.

Main characters

The majority of the characters are flat and undefined. Many of them are stock character

Stock character

A Stock character is a fictional character based on a common literary or social stereotype. Stock characters rely heavily on cultural types or names for their personality, manner of speech, and other characteristics. In their most general form, stock characters are related to literary archetypes,...

s, whose behavior is stereotypical and whose presence merely advances the plot.

• Bartley Fallon: a habitual pessimist, convinced that bad things will always happen to him.
• Mrs. Fallon: a bit belligerent, but supportive of her husband until there is a suggestion that he has been unfaithful.
• Jack Smith: the supposed victim, owns a hayfork.
• the Magistrate: an over-zealous bumbling idiot, given to wild suppositions and also stating the obvious.

Themes

Gossip: Gregory satirizes the way that people are happy to believe the worst about their neighbors, and tend not to think before they talk. She points out the ways in which gossip is distortive and leads to misunderstanding and even violence.

America: the characters in the play assume that America is a place where people go to escape prosecution, itself a dangerous place: Bartley says "I'm thinking if I went to America it's long ago the day I'd be dead."

Socio-political context

Spreading the News is a comedy that exploits both English and Irish stereotypes. Lady Gregory was a member of the Protestant upper classes

Social class

Social classes are economic or cultural arrangements of groups in society. Class is an essential object of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, economists, anthropologists and social historians. In the social sciences, social class is often discussed in terms of 'social stratification'...

 of Ireland, but she had sympathies for Irish Nationalism

Irish nationalism

Irish nationalism manifests itself in political and social movements and in sentiment inspired by a love for Irish culture, language and history, and as a sense of pride in Ireland and in the Irish people...

 and was a strong supporter of Irish culture

Culture of Ireland

This article is about the modern culture of Ireland and the Irish people. It includes customs and traditions, language, music, art, literature, folklore, cuisine and sport associated with Ireland and Irish people today. However, the culture of the people living in Ireland is not homogeneous...

 and identity. In this play she carefully reproduces the colloquial style and lower-class dialect of the workers on her estate in an effort to represent their culture accurately, and yet at the same time she reproduces various stereotypes about Irish people

Irish people

The Irish people are an ethnic group who originate in Ireland, an island in northwestern Europe. Ireland has been populated for around 9,000 years , with the Irish people's earliest ancestors recorded having legends of being descended from groups such as the Nemedians, Fomorians, Fir Bolg, Tuatha...

. She also includes satire versus the English governing class (of which she was a member) in the character of the Magistrate. The Magistrate comes to the village expecting people to be committing crimes: in a way, he is imposing his idea of their corruption on them, and they accept it/live up to it. However, there are no real "sides" in the play. Spreading the News may have been written to help the Irish and the English understand each other by having them see each other's flaws.